Tuesday, 12 July 2016

Music to go

Technology,
when it works, can be brilliant. When it doesn’t work … it can make you wonder,
with growing frustration, what happened to the idea that it was all supposed to
make life easier.

I’ve
written before about the travails of being a classical music listener dealing
with iTunes, but it is getting no easier.

Last year,
given both its age (and thus a sense of its limited life drawing inevitably toward
an end) and the prices old ones were fetching online, I made the decision to
mothball my classic iPod and get a new generation one.

Mistake.
The new one is a pain – the biggest size at that time is barely able to hold my
classical music collection, let alone anything else, and has not allowed for
any growth.

It’s
irritating to have it insisting on showing everything I’ve bought digitally so
that I play it from ‘the cloud’. I’d barely bought any classical music
digitally and stopped buying any music at all digitally some time ago.

I’ve stopped
buying comics digitally too, because I’m bored with discovering that, when I
want to read or listen to something, it is no longer where I had downloaded it
to upon purchase, but I have to download or stream it again, from … The Cloud
and possibly with additional costs.

Would
anyone really accept buying a book from a bookshop and then finding, when you
actually want to read it, the bookshop has taken it back and you have to go and
get it again.

Why would
I want to do any such thing with, say, a three disc opera while I’m on holiday,
for instance?

So, the
iPod classic has come out of mothballs and, over the last couple of days has polished
and plugged in to the computer, after yet another struggle uploading the music
I’ve bought in the last year (not actually a vast amount).

At over
six years old, my computer works wonderfully. Well, sort of. Because it’s two
months ‘too old’, it is no longer possible to upgrade the operating system and,
therefore, much other software.

The classic un-mothballed, with Music Angel

In other
words, it is becoming obsolete and I face having to buy a new one later this
year. And because of changes to tech – and concomitant efforts to get people to
store their stuff in The Bloody Cloud (or somebody’s else’s computer, as it
actually is), I shall also need to buy a disc drive and then a multi-USB block
so that I can have more than one peripheral attached at any one time.

Ah, the
joys of consumerism and the ways in which, having conspired to ensure that we
now need tech, we have to keep buying it (and more).

Anyway,
all this makes adding in new music to my library just a bit more complex. No
album cover art ever imports automatically; I have to do it manually, finding
it on the internet. And then, of course, there’s the perennial problem of
re-writing information so that you get some sense of organisation.

It makes
sense with classical music to organise a collection by composer for the most
part. In which case, every opera, for instance, needs retitling so that it
reads: ‘Composer: opera; [disc number]’, otherwise your Puccinis are all over
the shop and nobody wants that.

It’s worth
noting that my music listening has been improved of late with the purchase of a
new pair of headphones.

Now
several years old, my Sennheiser plugs had taken to crackling madly on
orchestral brass and percussion sections once I hit any sort of volume.

But here’s
where the internet is wonderful: inevitably, there was a guide to be found to
headphones for classical listeners – indeed, the one I found was at gramophone.com
and is regularly updated.

After a
detailed read, I ordered a pair – and although it’s meant moving away from
plugs (but big ones are so on trend these days), the sumptuous quality of sound
is more than enough compensation.

Something old ...

Interestingly,
the new ones are Audio-Technica
ATH-M50X studio monitor professional headphones – designed very much with DJs
in mind – but the definition when listing to an orchestra (you can almost pick
out individual instruments) is superb and makes you feel drawn right into the
heart of the music.

In addition, I found a
Music Angel – a diminutive speaker for an iPod, smartphone or tablet.
It needs no batteries, running off the gadget itself, and while the sound is
hardly earth-shattering, it’s a great way to ensure that you can play your
music when you’re away from home and there is no need to keep your music to
yourself.

And since it just jacks into your gadget, it's less likely to be rendered worthless by Apple changing stuff again.

So now I’m musically set
for the holiday – kitted out for travel and for our temporary residence.

Of course, having got such
things working again, the temptation has been to buy some new music.

And something new

And the most recent
additions to the collection include Hildegard von Bingen’s Canticles of Ecstasy from the Sequentia Ensemble for Medieval Music,
conducted by Barbara Thornton, and the Danish String Quartet playing pieces by
Thomas Adés (Arcadiana from 1994),
Per Nørgård (Quartett Breve from 1952) and Hans Abrahamsen (10 Preludes from 1973).

You might suppose that, separated
by ticking on for a thousand years, these lie at opposite ends of the musical
spectrum.

However, they share a
certain quality in their sparse, rather purifying sound, which creates an
introspective, meditative state of mind – a musical cleansing after too much
(if that’s possible) 19th century symphonic richness.

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About Me

London-based journalist, writer, photographer and artist, with one Other Half and three cats.
This blog is about all sorts of things, but mostly reviews. My interests include comics and opera (and even comic opera), cats, tattoos and art.
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